This is the thrilling story of a full and exciting life. James M. Cox was a newspaper publisher at age twenty-eight, a congressman preceding World War I, and governor of Ohio during war years and in the crucial period of adjustment that followed. He was a presidential candidate and observer at close range of most of the events and personalities which shaped the destiny of the United States for nearly fifty years. With Mr. Cox we go behind the scenes with the Wright Brothers, his neighbors in Dayton, Ohio, as they are about to launch the aeronautical era; we live through a half dozen vital Washington administrations, starting with President Taft's; we witness Cox's battle for vital prison reforms in 1912; we see the devastating Ohio floods of 1913 that swept into beautiful Miami Valley, nearly inundated the state and brought about one of the most brilliant flood-control projects of modern times. We witness the complete overhauling of the government in Ohio, a project which he fathered, along with the new constitution which implemented the whole program. We watch the strange antics of John Patterson, National Cash Register genius, who falls under the spell of a valet - and sues Mr. Cox for a million dollars for libel. We see at close range the intricate political campaign that elected President Wilson, and are told with new, never-before published facts the interesting story of the political conspiracy of 1919-1920, which led to the defeat of the League of Nations and the death of Woodrow Wilson. We get new slants on Warren Harding and his notorious betrayal by the Ohio gang; on William Jennings Bryan, John W. Davis and Al Smith, and on Roosevelt and the New Deal. We go with Cox to the World Monetary and Economic Conference in London in 1933, where he was vice chairman of the U.S. delegation, and hear an entirely new story of what actually happened there. This is a book of first-hand history, as seen and reported by one of the great trained observers of our times.